Tag Archives: World War II

May is Asian Pacific Legacy month, so it was an especially good time to visit the Asian Art

Jade tomb–Asian Art Museum

Museum in San Francisco. I saw their Tomb Treasures exhibit and was stunned by the remarkable beauty of objects created two thousand years ago. The graceful lines of a

dancer’s movements are immortalized in stone for us to marvel at. The beauty of a solid jade tomb and a set of jade armor is a legacy for all of us. Centuries come and go, but there is something heartening in knowing that across the centuries humans have created art that will enrich their descendants.

San Franciscans are lucky to have the magnificent Asian Art Museum in our city as well as so many other reminders of the Asian legacy like the famous Japanese Tea Garden in Golden Gate Park. All of these are an integral part of this country’s treasures that have been brought from so many parts of the world.

Americans haven’t always appreciated the value that Asians have brought us. One of the tragic heritages that lingers on in the memory of many people still alive is the

internment of people of Japanese descent during World War II.

Julie Otsuka’s book When the Emperor Was Divine gives an unforgettable picture of what happened during the early 1940s. Otsuka tells a touching story about a Japanese-American family living in Berkeley, California, in 1942 who are sent to an internment camp in Utah. Although the family had been living peacefully in their community for years, the father was suddenly arrested in the middle of the night and taken away. Then the mother and her two children are ordered, along with other Japanese-Americans on the West Coast, to leave their home for a detention camp.

The book is beautifully written and painfully sad to read. When the family is allowed to return home, they find their lives drastically changed. The reader is left wondering how or whether they will ever be able to return to normality.

Otsuka’s book is a reminder of how many mistakes Americans have made in treating people as part of a group rather than as the individuals they are. Our Asian legacy is filled with light and darkness. We must not let the dark parts of its history be repeated.

Perhaps the week that the Republican candidates held their final debate of the year was not the best week to reread Kurt Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse Five, but quite by accident that is what I did for my reading group. Vonnegut’s book was beloved by young people during the 1960s when the

Dresden view from City Hall after bombing in 1945

Vietnam War made pacifists of so many of us. In 1945, during World War II, Vonnegut, a young American soldier, was a prisoner of war in Dresden and was a witness to the destruction of the city by British and American bombers. The carpet bombing of Dresden killed about 25,000 people and destroyed one of the most beautiful cities in Europe. As Vonnegut’s protagonist Billy Pilgrim would say in the most famous phrase of the book “So it goes!”

Seventy years have passed since then, but the destruction of cities and the indiscriminate killing of people continues. As the Republican candidates made clear on Tuesday night, they believe the answer to the unease felt by many Americans now is to send bombers over to the Middle East to bomb and bomb and bomb until the unease passes—if it ever does. Ted Cruz even talked about “carpet bombing” although he didn’t make clear just which cities would be carpet bombed or how many thousands of people would be slaughtered before he and his supporters would feel safe.

The fear and hatred exhibited in the debate were in sharp contrast to the calm patience with which President Obama is going about the job of

President Obama and John Kerry

defeating extremists and establishing peace in the Middle East. That, of course, is the real solution to most of the terrorist threats in this country. It takes a strong leader to ignore the chattering of politicians and to stay focused on the important work of government in preserving peace and freedom. As Rudyard Kipling wrote in this poem (more familiar to our grandparents than to most of us) being a leader calls for good sense, patience, and courage:

If you can keep your head when all about you
Are losing theirs and blaming it on you,
If you can trust yourself when all men doubt you,
But make allowance for their doubting too;
If you can wait and not be tired by waiting,
Or being lied about, don’t deal in lies,
Or being hated, don’t give way to hating,
And yet don’t look too good, nor talk too wise…

So during this holiday season let’s wish good cheer to President Obama for all of his patient, well-considered work on defeating terror and maintaining peace, and to Secretary of State John Kerry whose diplomacy will keep America strong and safe without shedding the blood of innocent civilians.

Blessed are the peacemakers: for they shall be called the children of God.